A Study on Postmortem Changes in Vasopressin mRNA in Rat Brain Using a Non-Isotopic Method

Abstract

Recent studies in Alzheimer type dementia(ATD) disclosed a depletion of several neuropeptides in postmortem brains. With the progress of molecular biology, we can also study changes in neuropeptides messenger RNA(mRNA) to interpret the depletion in ATD brains. In general, radioactive probe has been used in the hybridization technique. However, we already reported in situ hybridization histochemistry (ISHH) method using a biotinylated oligonucleotide probe(Arai et al.,1988). In the present study, we tried to establish a method of dot and northern blot analysis using nonradioactive probes for quantification of mRNA.